Michael Boustridge, the new president of BT’s Americas operation, stopped by YG HQ recently along with head of sales Colin Spence. I asked them what they think the network (writ large) needs to learn how to do better this year.

Plenty, they seemed to agree. “I’m shocked by how many providers want to just throw bandwidth at the network — effectively ensuring that it becomes the very commodity that we all don’t want it to be,” said Boustridge. “We see the need for network investments that insure that enterprise applications can operate to the standards our clients have for them. BT delivers extremely low-latency service to financial services clients so they can do very fast trading. That’s not something you do with bandwidth, but with network intelligence. The network should also be able to manage mobility globally. It should know how and where to do roaming to deliver the best and most economical experience.”

One favorite soap-box of mine is presence-based services in the network. Spence chimed in here: “The industry needs to come together better on how we should support that. We’re waiting now on Cisco and Microsoft to agree on this in a standard, industry-wide way.”

Uh-oh. If one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated network providers is waiting on those two firms, the rest of us are really stuck…

Here we are, back once again to the season of predictions for the new year. But today I offer no guesses on the future, Oscar or otherwise. (Want some good YG predictions? Check out our recent work on the future of mobile music in Europe.) Instead of predictions, I’ve got a couple of wishes about my network.

1. I wish I weren’t a prisoner of my mobile network. I’d like to upgrade several of the phones in my household without the service commitment extending into the next millennium. (And yes, I’d be happy to pay market price in exchange.) I’d also like other devices I might have, or buy, to be able to use the network without a massive contractual hassle. If network providers want network consumption, they need to make it easier for me to flood the network with my devices — the same way my life is becoming flooded with devices in the first place.
2. I wish my network were smarter. I’m not a privacy freak; I want my network to know not only who I am and where I am, but how to provide continuinity to what I’m doing with it as I move around, even as I change devices. I guess I just want an Anywhere Network — one that’s high in capacity, highly intelligent, available anywhere. When will providers start handing off physical network knowledge to applications that can use it to make themselves more useful to me?

As Dickens said, we live in hope even as we die in despair.
What are your connectivity wishes for 2008?